Beers (including those not classified into beers of the Japanese Liquor Tax Law) are a representative example of conventional popular alcoholic beverages. Typically, beers are produced by saccharifying starch of barley to obtain wort, and subjecting the sugar components contained in the wort to alcoholic fermentation using yeast. Beers are characterized in that extremely wide varieties of texture, flavor, and taste, which are requirement of the products, can be achieved by setting, as appropriate, the kinds and ratio of main and auxiliary ingredients, fermentation conditions, and/or other conditions such as conditions of heating and filtering treatments, and the like employed in the beer production.
Here, beer-taste beverages (so-called, non-alcohol beer-taste beverages) have been widespread among consumers recently. The non-alcohol beer-taste beverages have alcohol contents of less than 1% by mass, and hence do not belong to alcoholic beverages of the Japanese Liquor Tax Law. Even when such a non-alcohol beer-taste beverage is ingested in a large amount to enjoy the beer taste, the total amount of alcohol ingested is small. Hence, the non-alcohol beer-taste beverages are suitable for water supply, and meet the needs of recent health oriented people (for example, see Patent Literatures 1 to 3). In general, the non-alcohol beer-taste beverages are produced by suppressing (insufficiently carrying out) the alcoholic fermentation in the production process, to thereby reduce the content of alcohol produced by the fermentation.